Zoho ties Quickbooks, telephony to its CRM

Online applications vendor Zoho is continuing to bring its CRM (customer relationship management) software up to par with longer-established offerings, announcing this week that it has completed integrations with QuickBooks and a number of telephony systems.

QuickBooks users will be able to sync customer and supplier information to Zoho CRM. Data from Zoho CRM, such as quotes and invoices, can be pushed to QuickBooks. The feature is compatible with on-premises QuickBooks Premier versions 2008 to 2010 as well as Simple Start 2008.

The new PhoneBridge option includes support for several PBX systems including Asterisk, Elastix, Avaya and Trixbox. It serves up customer contact information for incoming calls, can store notes made during calls and logs other details. It also enables single-click outgoing calls from within the CRM system.

Zoho has become known in recent years for its rapidly growing range of cloud-based software for smaller companies. Apart from CRM, it also has database, collaboration, word processing and application builder programs.

"These two integrations have been top of our list when it comes to new feature requests from customers," Zoho said in a blog post. That underscores the fact that Zoho, while garnering plenty of buzz, has some catching up to do with CRM competitors like Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics, which have broader partner ecosystems and larger sets of integrations with complementary applications.

Zoho CRM for QuickBooks costs US$25 per organization per month, while Zoho PhoneBridge is priced at $6 per user per month.

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